Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Synaptic Storage is AT&T’s Storage as a Service offering. It is one of the public cloud storage service, offering scalable, pay-per-use data storage you can access anywhere.

It has be in the market for over a year now. However, it is not plug and play like other AT&T services such as DSL or Telephone services. In order to use Synaptic Storage, you will need an access enabler. As an analogy, A DSL modem is an access enabler for the DSL service. A telephone is an access enabler for the telephone service. An access enabler is a piece of software or hardware that serves as an end point in your home or office, connecting your applications to AT&T Synaptic Storage.

Gladinet provides a set of access enablers for AT&T Synaptic Storage. Together, the set of access enabler is the Gladinet Cloud Access Suite.

Depending on your use case, there are several things that you can do with the access enablers.

Use Case 1 – Direct Drive Mapping Access

In this use case, you want to have a drive mapped directly from your desktop or a network share from a file server. When you drag and drop files and folders to the network drive, it is actually drag and drop to synaptic storage.

In this case, the access enabler provides you with a network drive, allowing you to transfer files using your familiar Windows Explorer interface, without forcing you to learn another user interface.

Use Case 2 – Backup

In this use case, you don’t need direct and ad-hoc drive mapping access. Instead, you have a set of files and folders, and possibly SQL servers that you want to backup to Synaptic Storage. You may want to do daily backup. You may want to do full and snapshot backup. Sometimes, you just need to have a second copy (mirror) of the local file sitting in Synaptic Storage.

In this case, you want to have the enabler allowing you to do set-and-forget backup from your local PC.

Use Case 3 – PC-2-PC Synchronization & Version Control

In this use case, it is very similar to the backup with version control over your files and folders. The only difference here is that the changes will be automatically pulled down to your other PCs that have the same configuration.

In this case, you want to have the enabler work as a facilitator and conduit for your files to flow from PC to PC.

See Also: Cloud Sync Folder feature in Gladinet Cloud Desktop

Use Case 4 – Cloud Storage Gateway through a File Server

This use case is very similar to the first use case (Direct Drive Mapping). It is more specialized to File Server for a group of users. The software can be installed on the file server itself and provide network share access to Synaptic Storage. So this access enabler works as a gateway to the backend Synaptic Storage.